Still Life, With Cats

I spent most of the day knitting. I had grand plans to get the taxes done and give the house a thorough cleaning, and while we did scrub down the kitchen and unearth the floor and all the surfaces in the office, we didn’t do nearly as much as we were planning, because….I spent most of the day knitting. And while it involved cotton yarn, it primarily wasn’t dishcloths.

I will reveal the thing later, once I get some good action shots. No, it’s not another goofy video, although one grey cat is involved, tangentially, but you will just have to wait to find out.

Things were going along smoothly until this evening, when Richard went to let Rosie out of her room (because she is on a self-imposed wet-food-only diet, we feed her in a room away from all the other cats so that they will not hoover up every bit of her food and leave her none), and noticed blood in her water bowl. Again.

Back up a bit. A week or so ago I’d noticed that the water in her bowl was tinged faintly red, and there were a few drops of dried blood on her heating pad. Naturally concerned, I flipped her over and opened her mouth to peer around inside. She had a whole bunch of teeth extracted a couple months ago, and I was concerned maybe there was some kind of infection or she’d bitten her tongue, or something. But I didn’t see anything, and she was acting normal (well, as normal as a 16 1/2 year old cat acts). So we decided to just keep an eye on her.

This time, however, it wasn’t just the blood in the water bowl. When she came out, she hopped up on my lap and I noticed immediately that her mouth was ringed with blood. I gently swabbed away what I could with a Kleenex and pried her mouth open, and that’s when I saw that there was a big hole in the roof of her mouth.

Here is where I note that this cat gets pilled twice a day (and is super easy to pill) and so I am looking inside her mouth a LOT. That hole definitely wasn’t there this morning.

So…we stuffed Rosie into a carrier and dashed off to the emergency vet.

I wish I could say that the verdict was a definite ‘oh, this is X, and here is how we treat it,” but alas, no. They verified that yes, there is definitely a big hole in her mouth, full of grossness that might be pus or might be necrotic tissue; they can’t really quite tell without a more invasive process like a biopsy. The vet did indicate that if she’s eating and drinking (which she is), then it obviously isn’t causing her any pain. It might be nothing more than an abcess, or it could be a something-or-other fistula (between the mouth and the nasal cavity) or it could be a tumor. We really don’t know at this point. All we know is that she has a big hole in the roof of her mouth.

The vet sent us home with some antibiotics, so that if there is any sort of infection, we can get started on clearing it up. We’ll schedule a visit with our regular vet at some point this coming week, to run more tests and see if we can narrow down the cause.

In the meantime, Rosie was squawking imperiously for food shortly after we returned home, and proceed to start inhaling it as soon as I put the plate down in front of her. So clearly she isn’t as bothered by this thing as we are. And for that I am grateful.

*****

In between noodling around on the other project, I did whip up a dishcloth. It’s a plain garter stitch cloth because I didn’t much feel like trying to track down a pattern. Please note presence of Rupert toes at top of picture.

And then, after we came home from the vet (shortly after 10pm, which is normally when we go to bed), I was pretty wired, my brain buzzing with all the ‘what-ifs’ for our elderly cat, and so I sat down and knit up another one. This one is based on the White Birch pattern. I say ‘based on’ because I could tell right away that there was absolutely no need for the garter stitch border, of which I am so not a fan, so I simply left it out.